University of Pennsylvania

ScholarlyCommons
Departmental Papers (Architecture)

Department of Architecture

1-1-2007

Where Architecture Meets Biology: An Interview

with Detlef Mertins
Detlef Mertins
University of Pennsylvania, mertins@design.upenn.edu

Originally published in Interact or Die! edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, pages 110-131. Published by V2 Publishing in 2007, Rotterdam.
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/arch_papers/7
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.

Where Architecture Meets Biology: An Interview with Detlef Mertins

Abstract

I began doing research on Mies van der Rohe in the early nineties, after Fritz Neumeyer had published his
book The Artless World, (1994). Neumeyer foregrounds Mies' library, the books that Mies read. He was also
the first to collect all the things that Mies himself wrote. One of the things that I found very surprising was that
Mies was a reader of science, and especially of biology in the 1920s. He had a collection of about 40 books by
the botanist Raoul Franc, the author of Der Sanze als Erfinder ("The Plant as Inventor," 1920). This was
surprising, for I had always thought of modernism as an architecture of technology rather than an architecture
that was imbued with organic aspirations and ethos. One thought of organic architecture more in terms of
biomorphic form; in the German context, one thought of Hugo Hring, but not the straight-up-and-down,
orthogonal architecture that Mies developed, or his expression of structure.
Disciplines

Architecture
Comments

Originally published in Interact or Die! edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, pages 110-131. Published
by V2 Publishing in 2007, Rotterdam.

This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/arch_papers/7

3
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An Interview with

Detlef Mertins

Detlef Mertins is an architect and historian known for his revisionist work on
20th-century architectural history. He is professor and chair of the architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include
an extended introduction to the theory of design as Gestaltung for the English edition of Walter Curt Behrendt's The Victory o f the New Building Style
(2000). He is currently completing a monograph on Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe. He published the essay "Bioconstructivisms," on form-finding principles derived from biological ideas used by architects during the last 250
years, in Lars Spuybroek's N0X:Machining Architecture (2004).

Where does the concept o f bioconstructivism come from?

May I answer this slightly biographically? I began doing reseach on Mies
van der Rohe in the early nineties, after Fritz Neumeyer had published his
book The Artless World (1994). Neumeyer foregrounds Mies' library, the
~oksthat IVies read. He was also the first to collect all the things that Mies
mseif wrote. One 01'the things that I found very surprising was that Mies
-....-.I-.
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d~ d rcducr UI xIcrlce, and especially of biology in the 1920s. He had a colction of about 40 books by the botanist Raoul FrancC, the author of Der
Sanze als Erfinder ("The Plant as Inventor," 1920). This was surprising, for
lad always thought of modernism as an architecture o f technology rather
than an architecture that was imbued with organic aspirations and ethos.
One thought of organic architecture more in terms of biomorphic form; in
the German context, one thought of Hugo'Haring, but not the straight-up-7d-down, orthogonal architecture that Mies developed, or his expression
'structure.
For me, this opened up a territory for research. It was Mies' personal liary that facilitated an expansion of research into this field. Then one dislvers these themes of architecture and biology in the Werkbund discourse
~din a wholeseries of architects and artists o f the period. Iwas also stimated by Olivar Botar, who was doing a Ph.D. in Toronto on what he called
e discour:je of biocentrism in the 1920s and '30s in Central Europe. He
,inted out that figures like El Lissitzky, Eszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Hannes ~ e ~ e r ,
~ o uHaus1
l
nann, Ern6 Kallai and others were all readers of Raoul FrancC.
Since the work of Lissitzky, Moholy and Meyer was all super-technological
for their day, it seemed that one should recast the notion of 1920s constructivism to incorporate this biologism. That's when I started to use the
te rm "bioconstructivism" in my teaching and writing. It's not a term that
t hey used at the time. It's a retroactive historian's glance, and at the same
tirne it seems like a useful concept to bring into the contemporary, to make
#.It
L I C:ar that there are continuities between then and now that we haven't ad-- ,
eq uately explored in the approach t o technology and media, even among
arc~hitectslike Lars Spuybroek, Greg Lynn, Karl Chu and others, who are minin13 biology and biologic thought for experimental form-making.
'

Raoul France uses the term "bio technics. "

s, and he was not the only one. Patrick Geddes used that term earlier, and
wis Mumford also used it later, but I don't think he knew France. Intertingly, Raoul France himself seems to have been influenced by the Werknd discourse on the rationalization o f technology. His approach to the
ta that plants or organisms could be seen as prototypes o f human tech-

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xi. This juxtaposes a list of Raoul H. FrancC's "seven Ur-foms of creation" (crystal, sphere,
,.-ne, rod, ribbon, screw, and cylinder) with one of Lissihky's Proun compositions.

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The architects and artists o f the 1920s saw in France's biotechnics an argument for a scientific understanding of things like functionality - that
form is the necessary result o f a function - and of optimization. There are
a host o f other related categories in France: mimimal means, the shorthest
path between two points, elementalism - the use of reduced, purified elements that cannot be further reduced as a way to achieve optimization
and also harmony, all o f which were considered to be operative throughout
' the universe according to fixed laws. France presented an entire cosmology
-'his publisher was even called Kosmos - which someone like Lissitzky was
v e r y sympathetic with, since he was oriented towards a new cosmology o f
,. , world reconstruction. Moholy-Nagy and other constructivists o f the 1920s
all wanted to have t h a t kind o f com~rehensive,scientific worldview as a
platform for their experimental work.

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How did M~esbie'Franc6?

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d'm i n the process o f finishihg a mdnograph on ~ i &and

, it's one o f the
things that I've been trying to articulate. Miessapproach to the organic and
.the biotechnical is not functional, at least not in the conventional sense, but
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he does take notions o f optimization, the rule o f the mimimum, and the
quest for harmony. He takes something that in France is more o f an underpinning than a foreground notion, and that is the relationship between organism and environment, for which Ernst Haeckel coined the science o f
ecology. Having read Frank Lloyd Wright describe his early buildings as organisms, I think Mies understood the building as an ot'ganism that is at work
within its milieu or environment. Just as life forms evolve, so too do architecture and technology. For Mies, architecture needed to achieve a new harmony with its environment, because the environment had been changing in
historical and material terms. This is the familiar modernist theme o f being
consistent with the times, which is usually thought o f in terms o f zeitgeist
but could also be approached from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. Mies surveyed what was going on in the world and read widely. He was
not only a reader o f science; he was a reader in many fields. He wanted especially to understand how philosophers, theologists and scientists were
thinking about the present condition, about the problematics o f modernity,
the metropolis, mass society, the loss of orientation and Bildung. He tried to
develop a nascent worldview for which his architecture would be an active
agent. It's an agent for the development o f that new world in the same way
that somebody like Lissitzky argued for world reconstruction. But Lissitzky
said in 1924, "Enough o f the machine ... I want to build limbs o f nature." So
Mies used France for an evolutionary and environmental underpinning. Take
the idea that the building is an open construct to the landscape that allows

~\

Lkszld Moholy-Nagy, with Zstvcin SebSk, Kinetic-Constructive System: !jtructure wi

Movement Track for Play and Conveyance (1 922/1928), photomon tngc and collag
on bromure, Indian ink and watercolor on card 76 x 54.5 cm (courtesjr Theaterwi!
senschaftliches Institut der Universitiit Koln)

for movement and exchange between inside and outside. Again, this is a
standard modernist trope, but it is informed by how science understands
relationships of organisms to the environment. He also read Jakob von
,
Uexkull, Hans Driesch and Paul Krannhals. Later, in America, he read D'Arcy
Thompson, Erwin Schrodinger, Julian Huxley, Arthur Eddington and Lancelot
Law Whyte.
France's ultimate goal was to articulate what in German would'be called
a Lebenslehre, a doctrine of life, a way of living, knowledge of how t o live,
and how to live well - in his terms, a healthy life too. I think the notion of
health was central for his doctrine. The other thing that is very interesting
about the artistic reception of France by people like Lissitzky and Moholy is
that they take up the idea of emulating the constructive processes of nature, but their conception of the world is monistic. There's no divide between nature and humanity. The human is in nature already. They're
interested in technqlogical evolution as a way to open up an expanded horizon of experience, as a way t o develop new functionalities, new relation. , ships through invention. Moholy most famously concentrated on the
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'question of vision and new optics. So for him, the camera, microscope, tel: escope, and film camera were technologies that expanded the human facil. :*
"ity for vision, and revealed hidden worlds and new knowledge. New art and
new architecture could have similar effects.
You can also think o f this in terms of expanded capacities, expanded
e
powers. There's a very interesting article by the Austrian artist-designer
Friedrich Kiesler from 1939 on "co-realism" and "biotechniques," written
when he was already in the United States Bill Braham pointed me t o this
article, which is in his new anthology of writings on architectural technology. Kiesler defines his notion of co-reality as an exchange of interacting
forces and situates the idea of expanding human capacities within it. He
says that forms are "the visible trading posts of integrating and disintegrating forces, mutating at low rates o f speed." He defines co-realism as the
science of the exchange of relationships and forces, which emphasizes the
dynamics of continual interaction between humanity and the environment,
made between the natural and the
m the notion of biotechnics, since it
. , .seems to privilege the natural over the human. And he says we shouldn't imitate how nature constructs things; we should be developing what he calls
biotechniques that allow us t o influence life in a desired direction. For instance, he wants t o move from the assembly of structures t o continuous
construction.
Kiesler wants to develop "the potential ,of specific actions contained in
any nucleus of human physiology, resulting in entirely new functions sustained by inventions." This set of ideas still uses the ecological model of the
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human organism in its milieu, but now stresses the interactive; &nakic, and
inventive dimension of that relationship. Interactions taking place in society, technology, art, every sphere o f activity - this is a holistic notion of interactivity. Through interaction, it's possible for us to expand. Now, that is
exactly what human technology has actually facilitated. It has expanded
our powers as creatures, and with those powers we can do either good things
or bad things, constructive thin or destr tive things, and all kinds of
things in between. But it's on1 rough interactiv~ -that's my point here.
For Kiesler, form ceases to be the key term, because forms are always contingent They're fluid, changing, they're a moment in between: you go from
formlessness t o form and then back t o formlessness, and it keeps going.
Form as a concept becomes nested inside this dynamic model of the universe,
and that changes it. Lissitzky put it beautifully back in 1924: "Every form is
the frozen instantaneous picture of a process. Thus a work is a stoppingplace on the road of becoming and not the fixed goal."

r\,

Was this also a Lebenslehre for Kiesler?

By implication, yes, but he didn't use the term or outline a way of living. It's
an interesting horizon to think about: on the one hand, the model that is beginning t o emerge by the middle of the 20th century conceives of form generation as self-generation within a field of interactive forces, agents and
conditions, but then on the other hand it leads very quickly t o interactivities that involve us. Our activities, too, are life activities. Kiesler again invokes
the criterion o f health. Health is a huge and underresearched topic in the
history of ideas o f the 20th century. We should really confront it today in the field of architecture, but I don't think we are equipped for that right
now, at least not on my side of the Atlantic.
So i n the mid-20th century it's interactivity that produces form, while
i n earlier ideas about bioconstructivism, like Ernst Haeckel's, there was
no interactivity involved?
Yes, but I'd like to add a nuance t o t h a t Your question takes us to another
related topic. For in Haeckel's Kunstforme der Natur ("Art Forms in Nature,"
1904) he presents the radiolarian as an exemplar of an organism - microscopic, single-celled, elemental in that regard - that has over 4,000 variations around the world. Each variation is adapted t o its immediate
environment. Their seemingly boundless variety and beauty, which is what
led Haeckel to offer them as models for art, is related to their adaptivity,
which is related to interactivity.

"We I
to ma ke us understand this fact, more and more, deeper and
rd by a
deepe r, richer and richer. A11 our being i
consfliousness of corealism."
Fredarick Kiesler, d r w i n g , 1937.

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But Haeckel sees form more as a mothematical construct than as the

outcome o f a biological process.

He sees their form in terms o f crystallography or a mathematical model,

and that's o f course what's greatly interesting to the engineers later on, t o
Le Ricolais, to Buckminster Fuller and others. But Haeckel is a biologist first
and foremost. And the division between biology and mathematics is not so

ages 120 an
rble 91 and

:E m t Haerkel, Art Fc,nnsin Nan

lic facsimih es publisher:i by Kurt St

strong. Mathematics is a tool wittiin biolog~

1. Just as tihe divisioribetween bir m A +hrn.
ology and physics nowadays is not so strong because it's blullru
Lllluuy
the mediation of mathematics. Typical for Haeckel was that he wanted to se
regularity and uniformity within the individual organism. More recent1
using much more powerful microscopes than Haeckel had, Frei Otto and h.researchers discovered that the structure of the radiolarians incorporates
eccentricities and irregularities. They're not pure. There was a huge emphasis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on purity and regularity, which
you get in Haeckel, and of cour:;e also in Mies. But that's not to say that
there is no conception of process or interac:tivity. Haeckel is the person who
coined the discipline of ecology, as the study of the i'nterrelati~nshi~
between organisms and their environment. Organisms are also understood to
be building their environments. They're making the environment while the
environment is making them.
There is a chapter in Raoul Franc6's book Die Waage des Lebens ("The
Balance o f Life," 1927) i n which he describes a visit to Haeckel, who
was his teacher. And then Franc6 illustrates the difference between
Haeckel and himself Haeckel says: I've shown all the forms o f nature,
and now my drawings can be used as a template for making new art.
And Franc6 says: No, you shouldn't look at the forms, you should look
a t the problem that is solved by'the form, and when you want to solve
the same problem in engineering, use the same method as the organism used in solving it by producing its own specific form.
You're right. There's a far greater emphasis on proble~
m-solving in the 1920s .
and in France. But I still consider Haeckel to be a proto-bioc~
onstructivist.
For one thing, he was a monist - he was the person in whose honor the
Monist League was formed. And he wrote books on how even society and
government should be modeled on nature. I don't want to make bioconstructivism too big a term historically. I f the field of people and theories becomes too big, it also becomes too fuzzy. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright
is famous for advocating organic architecture, modeling architecture on nature, and yet even within his oeuvre there are so many iterations of what
that is formally that it becomes dizzying. From his early work to the Guggenheim, there's a world of difference.
Other historians have shown - I'm thinking of Caroline van Eck's Orgonicism i n 79th-Century Architecture (1994) that organicism has been integral to architectural theory within the Vitruvian tradition since Alberti. If
we read Alberti, he advises architects to emulate the way in which nature
achieves unity, harmony and wholeness, and also to emulate nature's methods of construction. What Van Eck does in her book is to trace continuity in

architectural theory from the Renaissance through to the end o f the 19th
century along these two guiding principles. There are so many architects
who have aspired to something like biotechnics or bioconstructive activity.
Of course, recourse to natural models has not always led t o bio; in some
cases it's crystals. For example, in Frobel's educational pedagogy - Frobel
was trained as a crystallographer and many o f the toys or "gifts" he developed for kindergarten learning, which were intended to allow the children
t o understand the order o f the universe intuitively, are informed by a crystallographic paradigm. Crystals fascinated a lot of people in the 19th century and later because they grow and exhibit a vital force but they are
inorganic, not organic. Incidentally, that made them seem more effective as
models o f purified engineering and mechanical technologies.
The problem with crystals as a model is that there is a difference between self-ordering and self-organization. Crystals are self-ordering,
which is a very different process than the self-organization you find
i n organisms.

It would be very interesting to look at how the term "organization" came

into discourses on architecture and art. It's there, for example, in Hannes
Meyer's 1928 manifesto Bauen, in which he says: Building is biology, it's organization; it's a technical process, not an aesthetic process. Unlike Lissitzky,
who had no issue with art, Meyer wanted to get rid o f art. He wanted building to be pure construction and pure organization. That is informed by biological notions o f interrelationships. Organization means establishing
relationships among cells, atoms and other components, which are then
mutable, which can change, which are conditioned by what Meyer calls
"forces." It involves coordination as well. "Building is the deliberate organization o f the processesof life... nothing but organization: social, technical,
economic, psychological organization," Of course, organization becomes a
much bigger topic in the 1950s and '60s with people like Gyorgy Kepesand
cybernetics. And it's a big topic again today, whether it's self-organization
or the organizational logics o f global capitalism.
What is the relation between organization and form i n architecture?
For the people we've been talking about, form is the result o f processes.
They might define the process using the notion o f organization. Form is a
reorganizing o f energy and matter into a contigent coagulation that may
then dissolve again. Organizations are mutable, in motion. In chaos theory,
organization is a principal figure used t o describe how order emerges out of
*what seems to be completely disorganized, often suddenly and unexpect-

edly. Organization can produce patterns as easily as forms, tissues and struc.,
tures that are extensive rather than discrete.
Form has had a tendency to imply individual entities that are bounded, , ,
whose outlines are well defined - have clear Gestalts - rather than things
that are open and contiguous with their context But it need not be that
way, and already with the open plan of 1920s modernism, form was seen to
be open, permeable, an organization whose boundaries were ambiguous.
The specific arrangement o f walls and openings and the sizing of spaces
were conditioned by the things that are in the living world and in the environment as well, and the relationships that were desired with the environment Siegfried Ebeling's book Der Roum als Membran ("Space as Membrane,"
1926) puts forward such an open conception of form and refers to biolog)
explicitly. As this notion of the open plan became canonized in the theor\
o f modern architecture, it somehow lbst its biologistic references. It's interesting that the architects of bioconstructivism today hardly ever talk aboul
space, let alone spatial dynamics or effects or space-time, as people like Moholy, Ebeling and also Siegfried Giedion did. I think that's a real limitation
Why limit the discussion to form so strongly? One o f the many things thai
interests me about Lars Spuybroek's work is that it has never been just aboul
form, but also about space, perception, effect and - of course - '~nteractivity.

'

'

What makes the connection between Mies and his study o f biology sc
strange is that Mies seems to be an absolute control freak, while t h ~
processes as described by Raoul Frand and used by recent "non-stondard" architects like Spuybroek and Lynn are about self-organization, which is basically giving matter the space and opportunity to organize itself; Mies van der Rohe seems to personify the transcendent approach to architecture, as opposed to the immanent approach yo^
find i n Franc6 and biologistic architects today.
That's a great question. Let me start by saying that when the idea of epigenesis is approached as pure presence, we get into considerable trouble. We , ,,
take the organism out o f its environment, out o f time, out of history and
evolution, out of its field of interactivity. And we reassert the opposition of
human and natural, which is untenable. That opposition has been employed
as a shorthand form of evaluation - natural good, human bad - a kind of
purist morality, in fact. We need better terms of assessment than that, more
precise and productive terms, ones that enable thought to travel fluidly between the human and natural, to explore their interrelationship and coevolution. That's where Kiesler's notion of co-realism could be developed.
Incidentally, claims to self-organization by Spuybroek and Lynn can easily be
overstated since both use methods that are highly scripted and artificial.

,-

ither digital animation modeling nor material analogical modeling is nature in itself; rather, they are biotechniques in Kiesler's sense. Both architects
select or develop specific methods to use from among many available, with
some task or some probe already in mind. Then they produce many variations, from which they choose one t o develop, judging somehow - intuitively, most often - that i t has more potential than the others for the task
at hand, be it a skyscraper or a house or a faqade.
In Mies, the relationship between immanence and transcendence is certainly not clear, as it is not clear in a lot o f others. But he had a powerful
impulse towards immanence. Mies was a reader o f Henri Bergson. His library included a copy of Creative Evolution. And he tells us that he learned
from Whitehead. Both are important philosophers o f immanence who cross
over into science. Your question refers t o the end result, the building as
built, which is indeed totally resolved. All the different scales o f the building are brought into alignment, from the superstructure t o the details o f
joints. But it's very interesting to think o f Mies' method o f working. Mies
would start slowly. There's a beautiful essay by Francesco Dal Co in which
- he talks about Mies'slowness as the result o f wanting to wait for the right
thing, the moment of presence that he could assist. He thought of architecture as service in that regard - not unrelated, o f course, to the old idea of
the genius as a conduit for the divine.
In 1926, Mies said, in a debate with the editor of the Werkbund journal
Die Form, "Isn't the title of your journal too strong?" Because form is not an
a priori or even the goal but the result of a process. And you don't know the
result of that process until it's over. Mies was thinking here about the notion o f Gestaltung, which France's writings reinforced, but which Mies
would have known from the group around Hans Richter, o f which Mieswas
Part, and the ir journal G. Gestaltung means "form creation." Mies took issue
wit h the ediitor o f Die Form for being overdetermined in his attitude towa Irds form.
Mies often designed through probes and alternatives. Especially in furniture, you see this very clearly, but also in some o f his buildings, where he's
mapping out a range o f possibilities and then chooses to develop one. He
said things like "I don't design buildings, Idevelop them." That was his ethos.
But he was looking for the objective-solution, the optimal solution, with
minimal means, in harmony with the'cosmos, and so brought the building
into alignment with what he understands t o be the order o f the universe.
Geometry is a big part o f that order. Is the result transcendental? I don't
know. It's interesting that each building is different in the end, even those
that seem very similar. Most are very different - from the Barcelona PavilThere are similarities, o f course, but also big

One of the things that's very interesting at>out all th

11 from t h ~
1920s and this pertains to Mies as well - is the idea thaI ~ I L I ~ I L C Lcoulc
~U~~
be redefined as a medium of elements and techniques. Think of the Bauhau
curriculum, which is tremendously important, I think. Architecture is not i
medium of predetermined motives, styles, plans, organizations. These archi
tects from the 1920s tried to identify what thc! constitue!nts and Iclgics of thc
medium were -just as Kandinsky had alreadlI done for painting before thc
war - and how one could use the medium t c create dcsired effe!cts - ligh
and dark, rough and smooth, transparency and opacity, et cetera. They articulated its logic of assembly in terms of montage. Tha t is consistent with
the theory of Gestaltung, and it's not an accident tha t the sub1.itle of the
#---:-magazine G is "Material zur elementaren Gestaltung.'v hmcarllrly,
what arc
the materials and means of elementary form creation? Mies often referrec
to the means of architecture in that period of time. So if, at the end of thl
day, his building is square, like the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the squarc
is presumably both immanent and transcendent. Perhaps one could also sa!
that for Mies transcendence was immanent as well as imminent. Today, yo1
are right t o be skeptical. But it's hard t o distinguish what's transcendent anc
what's immanent there. On the other hand, Mies' approach may be helpful
since it incorporates both preformation and epigenesis, which is essential
for any theory of emergence.

This is also the problem for interactive artists: are we prescribing o

determining form and behavior? Are we making means for a specific
experience, or are we creating conditions for what has been called the
experimental exercise o f freedom?
Well, another thing with Mies - probably in some ways more clearly than
with other architects - is that his buildings stage experiments in living. This
takes us to the theme of interactivity, of people living and acting in relation
to architectural or art constructs. For instance, the pavilion of the Neue Nationalgalerie is not a conventional space for the display of art. It is big, empQ
and open to the outside on all sides. And Mies knew very well that he wa!
creating a problem for the curators, who complained when the buildins
opened that they had a hard time displaying easel paintings in the big space.
But Mies said, "Maybe there's a better way to do it." And he didn't want to
miss t h a t He deliberately provoked new ways of displaying art, perhaps even
new ways of producing art. Well rehearsed in the environmental ambitions
of modern art, he probably thought that easel painting was over and saw
that large mural works were being made by Picasso, Pollack, and others. If
we track through the history of exhibitions in that space over the last 30 ,
years, we see some shows that were brilliant in relation t o the building, and

some shows that were miserable because they did not respond to it at all.
Mies provided a challenging architecture. In the last ten or fifteen years
there have been rather extraordinary installation pieces by Jenny Holzer,
Matt Mullican and Ulrich Ruckriem and equally poignant exhibition designs
by Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas' Content was brilliant. Mies certainly didn't anticipate site-specific art, but the combination of structure
and openness in the building has provided a great framework for it.
In the 1920s and again in the 1950s and '60s, modern architecture was
preoccupied with supporting and provoking new ways of living - treating
life itself as an experiment Making form was experimental, and the way of
life was also not predetermined - back to FrancC. Architecture was intended
to open the way for and support experiments in future paradigms of living.
In Mies' case, that had to do with living outside as much as inside, blurring
the boundaries between the outside and the inside, gardens and buildings.
Later, in the universal spaces of his American work, like Crown Hall, there's
as much provocation at play as already conceived ways of occupying the
building.
Mies was developing his architecture in relation to the user?

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, Glass Room,
Gennan Werkbund Erhibition, Stuttgart (1927)

I think so. For instance, in the 1920s he was a friend o f Hugo Haring; they
shared a studio. But he criticized Haring for wanting too tight a fit between
form and function. Haring would design houses where the hallway to the
bedroom would become narrower towards the end because fewer people
would be using it. And Mies used to say, "Why not make a really big hallway
so people can use it: for many different things?" The question o f sizing and
scale comes up here. Mies has a very generous scale, and in part that's intended t o permit a variety o f ways o f occupying these spaces.
Let's jump to more recent bioconstructivism. One o f the fascinating
aspects o f the work o f the so-called non-standard architects o f today
is that although the relationship between the elements o f the building is clear, the relationship between the building and the user is
sometimes problematic.
That takes us back to the tension between a focus on form and a focus on
function or program or event. Sometimes architects choose one side or the
other of this binary opposition. But these are not mutually exclusive by any
means, and somebody like Kiesler makes that very clear. In the 1939 essay
that I quoted earlier, he speaks o f structure as a third term to which both
form and function need to refer. He calls for an understanding o f form, function and structure as interrelated, which suggests that all three are related
to organization. I f we think o f structure as organization o f relations rather
than physical structure alone, and recognize that organization is always dynamic and interactive even when it appears to us as static, then we have
more tools to deal with and can easily integrate the users and their ways o f
living or working or playing. This kind o f integrated approach has yet to be
adequately theorized in contemporary "non-standard" or bioconstructivist
work, although any good architect will pursue integration as a matter of
course, will seek t o have their design perform on many levels.
It is a big shortcoming in contemporary work that organizational relations - which are ones of inhabitation, function, use, ways o f living - do
not play a stronger formative role. Perhaps, like Mies, we would want to
avoid Haring's overdetermination of form by a reductive conception of function. Kiesler, too, was critical o f the maxim-that form follows function; he
suggested instead a progression o f (1) structure, (2) function, (3) form. "All
functions and all forms are contained in the structure," he said. Mies developed his clear-span structures - the so-called universal spaces - in order to
be flexible with respect to use. He said, "Functions change so rapidly today,
but buildings don't, so you can't design form for function." But at the same
time, his buildings worked very well, and even graciously. He managed to
negotiate a delicate relationship between structure and function while also
remaining open t o change, to things that aren't expected. Perhaps there's a

reason why the generic loft space or column grid space - Le Corbusier's
Domino extended - has become so ubiquitous, successful and durable. In
that regard, it's interesting t o think that contemporary bioconstructivist
work on extensive structures could update this model. Reiser+Umemoto,
Lars Spuybroek, Zaha Hadid have all produced some projects that do that.
The recent avant-garde has often ascribed a kind of open-endedness in
use and experience to curved and sloping surfaces. Think o f Spuybroek's
Fresh Water Pavilion, which was a fantastic and amazing project at the time
and opened up a new trajectory for many others. The argument that sloping surfaces are open to interpretation in terms of use is true, but they're
also not very handy for many things. They're good in some ways but not in
others. A child can run up them or sit on them, but what else might people
want to do and what support do they need for that? How can one incorporate an open-ended but neverthelek I;ragmatic conception of use into
the process of generating form? This was a question that confounded the
architects of De Stijl at first too, and the early Bauhaus, which was accused
of formalism. To me, it seems as odd today when architects rely on a single
-formal language for everything as it did when Gropius designed his first office,atthe Weimar Bauhaus using cubic forms for everything: the desk, the
- lamp, the wall textile, the armchair, the teapot, etcetera. Even though we
enjoy the voluptuousness of the new curved language, why not accept that
different geometries can coexist irt built environments as they do in nature?
The task at hand is the integration of multiple parameters and objectives
into the new generative approach to design. As David Ruy always points
out to me, geometry is inherent to matter and material organizations, of
which human life is one example. Even though geometry isa human discov--. if not invention, it's in the universe. Having developed some remarkable
cry,
toolIs over the past few years for generating form using models sets from naturf :or science - I'm amazed by the work with algorithms that Cecil Balmnl
..., nd, David Ruy, Jenny Sabin and Ben Aranda are doing here at Penn as
:h as the diagrammatic work derived from coral and tree bark that Rhett
Russo, Bill Braham and Annette Fierro are doing - the challenge now is to
a"+,
cAL<ndthe rigor o f those initial techniques through the rest of the design
proc:ess and construction. And not lose the experimentalism and open-endedness. Architecture requires an anthropological and cultural imagination
as nnuch as an architectonic one. Inclusiveness and interactivity are key to
botlh. As Kiesler said, our mission should be to nurture alternative ways of
livir~g- and expanded horizons of experience - through new structures. At
Penn, Matthias Hollwich did a studio last semester on symbionic resorts and
..
lelstJre, which had that spirit, and also humor and irony, which I appreciate
sinc'e this can all become much too serious.

There's a task here, a substantial task for the discipline, because without
integration of the many dimensions that make architecture tick, this kind of
work is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to critique; it's vulnerable to obsolescence;
it's vulnerable t o not being realized. It's simply inadequate to the multidimensional nature of architecture as a disci~line.It's where architectonic invention slides into sculpture. Sculpture doein't have to have uses, at least not
traditional sculpture, other than t o inspire and amuse and provoke in its reception. The reception of architecture is in its occupation and performance
as well as in its perception. The challenge is to put aside eitherlor thinking
and develop habits of mind that are inclusive. I think interactive art has
many lessons for architecture in this.
Do you consider bioconstructivism today as a flourishing field with o
l o t o f potential?
Yes, it's extraordinary and inspiring. It's fueled a lot of formal and structural

invention through digital media and material experiments. It's expanded the
discipline. Now, we have to find avenues to draw research and knowledge together that's currently housed i n different silos within the discipline. There's
so much innovation taking place in engineering - structural, environmental engineering - that we need t o integrate. There's lot of potential, also, in
integrating intelligence to make buildings that are responsive. At Penn, Ferda
Kolatan is leading an effort to do that, as he has in his own work. All this is
on top of the more effective engagement with uses and programming that
we've talked about already.
At the same time, at least two additional issues have come into focus over
the past few years, which also need to be embraced: environmental degradation and urban dynamics. The US is finally waking up to the issues of climate change and the need to get off oil and develop other sources of energy
and other materials that are not petroleum products. In Europe, you are, of
course, much ahead of us in all this. Global warming demands that we take
responsibilityfor other interactivities than we have talked about so far. There
is no reason why more buildings can't be generators of energy, rather than
just consumers. Why not integrate that goal into the next generation of
generative models for design? Karel Klein, for instance, has done studios
here where students use patterning tools to design buildings that capture
and circulate the maximum energy from the sun on a site in Philadelphia,
That's actually a good bridge into the question of urban dynamics - how
architecture can contribute to the growth and development of cities and
economies. In a lovely book by the late Jane Jacobs, The Nature o f Economies
(2000), she describes how economies grow, develop and expand using an
ecosystems metaphor. She says it's helpful to think about how energy passes

through ecosystems, what kind and how many transformations of energy

and matter take place. In desert ecosystems, less happens than in well-developed forest ecosystems. In a desert or a parking lot, sunlight heats things
up but doesn't get circulated much and basically disappears. In the forest,
energy is circulated in a web of teeming, interdependent and interacting
organisms, plants and animals. It's not just converted once but many times,
combined and recombined, cycled and recycled, passed around from organism to organism. That's how diversity, intricacy and complexity develop. The
flow of energy, she says, is "dilatory and digressive," leaving behind complex
webs of life. It's worth thinking about how the design and making of buildings can enrich ecosystems - human as well as natural - by circulating and
recirculating energy. Literally in terms of the energy they use or produce. If
they produce energy, not only will this offset global warming, but that energy can be sent into the world to circulate more and in more productive
ways. But we can take this less literally, too, if we think of the economies
and urbanisms in which the production o f buildings participates - their
maintenance and transformations over time, too. We know that they can be
catalytic within urban economies, whether it's Gehry's Guggenheim energizing the economy of Bilbao or more ordinary projects for housing, schools
and retailing in local neighborhoods. It seems to me that this, too, would be
in the spirit of an updated bioconstructivism. Some architects have worked
in this direction, but not, as far as I know, the more formally oriented neoavant-garde, even though they have now embraced issues of material fabrication and have sometimes talked about their work as catalytic. It's time
to radically expand the sphere of interactivity and effects that architects engage, to become serious and activist on that front. We need to develop inclusive habits of mind, to embrace the so-called real world, and work
towards attaining multiple goals. There are many issues and resources that
can be harnessed and brought together with experimental form-making;
it's a tremendous horizon. Without bringing all that together, it seems to me
that pure, disinterested experiments in form are inadequate to the tasks
that face architects today.